John M. (John Metcalf) Taylor

A Connecticut-focused historian and biographer, John Metcalf Taylor wrote about some of the colony’s most dramatic and formative episodes. His best-known book, The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut, 1647–1697 (1908), examines accusations, trials, and public panic in early New England through surviving records and contemporary accounts.

Taylor also wrote Roger Ludlow, the Colonial Lawmaker (1900), a study of one of Connecticut’s key founders, and Maximilian and Carlotta, showing that his interests reached beyond New England history. Taken together, his books suggest a writer drawn to political power, historical conflict, and the human stories hidden inside official documents.

He lived from 1845 to 1918. Although many personal details are hard to confirm online, his surviving works show a clear interest in careful historical investigation and in making the colonial past readable for a wider audience.